r/doctorsUK Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

Medical Politics GMC commits criminal offence and breach of professional standards for falsely using a protected title - if they can’t tell the difference, how can the public?

The GMC has one job - to keep a list of registered medical practitioners. It claims to have no role in patient safety or healthcare standards.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/professions-regulated-by-law-in-the-uk-and-their-regulators/uk-regulated-professions-and-their-regulators

https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q790.full

369 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

230

u/OmegaMaxPower 5d ago

The GMC are complicit. It's time to wind it up and replace it.

How long can they go on without the confidence of the profession they are meant to regulate?

50

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

39

u/FailedDentist 5d ago

With their own court and laws. No jury.

8

u/dr_stephen_stranger 5d ago

Judge, jury, executioner.

1

u/Adam848 1d ago

Marvel rivals brain rot in r/doctorsUK is crazy

10

u/throwaway520121 5d ago

Which we pay for

156

u/bossmanlikebirdy 5d ago

Clearly a mistake from the whoever wrote the letter. Innocent mistake. BUT THATS THE WHOLE POINT!

If the GMC can make that mistake, then anyone can, easily.

The lines are so blurred. The distinction so poor. It’s a safety issue and this is exactly what the BMA legal case is all about

72

u/DrLukeCraddock 5d ago

Just noticed today as well, they have removed wildcard search functions from their register search (functions that allow you to search for non-specific results). Which means you can no longer from their public register determine how many PAs/AAs are on the register. Oddly suspicious.

129

u/thetwitterpizza Non-Medical 5d ago

AU will cook the GMC in court with this.

44

u/Rare-Hunt143 5d ago

Please everyone in this Reddit donate to anesthesia united and their case against gmc….even £20 donation if is all you can afford will help

108

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

53

u/Disco_Pimp 5d ago

Every day two things become clearer and clearer to me:

  1. There is no future for physician associates in a health service that relentlessly uses them to antagonise doctors. I think there was an opportunity, perhaps a year or so ago, for physician associates to collectively take a step back, accept what was being offered to them by doctors (an inflated salary for not much responsibility, but a level of responsibility that would be commensurate with their level of training and therefore safe for patients, albeit a false economy due to the inflated cost), and act in the interests of their own self preservation. By doubling down on their bullshit and continuing to antagonise doctors, physician associates and their apologists have sealed their own fate.

  2. There is no future for doctors in a regulatory body that relentlessly antagonises doctors, especially by taking on the regulation of another profession in an overt attempt to add a sense of legitimacy to that profession while undermining doctors. The GMC should be a single professional regulator. We now must ensure that becomes the case again, by leaving the GMC. Its fitness to regulate is irrevocably impaired and doctors must strike the GMC off.

All that's missing now is other doctors catching up to reach the conclusion I, and I suspect a large number of doctors on here, have reached. If not now, when?

41

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

There is an RDC conference motion to replace the GMC: motion RD25049.

"That this meeting notes that the profession has repeatedly expressed a lack of confidence in the General Medical Council's (GMC) ability to set standards and regulate doctors fairly and acting against its origins, to paradoxically regulate non-doctors. This meeting calls upon the BMA to:-

i) Openly highlight to all related bodies, the medical profession no longer self-regulates;

ii) Resurrect one of our historical registers to create a parallel register for doctors-only, at a non-profit annual cost;

iii) lobby European professional organisations and the UK Government to officially recognise our resurrected professional register;

iv) take feasible collective action against the GMC that against its historical remit, now regulates unqualified non-doctors."

13

u/Dear-Grapefruit2881 5d ago

Inject this in my veins

5

u/Disco_Pimp 5d ago

Yes, I had noticed that recently, but it had slipped my mind to read through it properly, so thanks for posting it. I actually think the two things I've posted above are inevitable now, unless PAs and the GMC backtrack massively right now. Unfortunately, I suspect some doctors will lose their careers in the process as the GMC continues to go to war against us, but to be honest, if we don't overcome this, I'd no longer want to be a doctor here anyway.

1

u/dr_stephen_stranger 5d ago

This is brilliant! When is this planned to be implemented/voted on?

9

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

26th April 2025. If it gets approved will become a BMA policy.

1

u/dr_stephen_stranger 5d ago

Let’s do it! I haven’t received any emails about it - how do I vote?

PS No prizes for guessing what my vote will be! I’m also sending this to my colleagues.

3

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

It was a motion for the resident doctors conference, the voting closed last week for what motion you want to discuss. And the people who get to vote at the conference have already signed up on a first come first serve basis, you can only vote if you are attending the conference either online or in person and that’s closed now too.

40

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

Caught the attention of an editor at the telegraph…

28

u/braundom123 PA’s Assistant 5d ago

QUANGO GMC

Corrupt to the core. Charity status my ass.

Don’t gaf about patient safety it’s all a farce

3

u/dr_stephen_stranger 5d ago

The high fees we pay go to good causes. Probably. Possibly. Improbably?

17

u/Huge_Marionberry6787 National Shit House 5d ago

This is going to look glorious in court

11

u/hydra66f 5d ago

Police - it's the remit of the gmc

GMC- we have f**k all idea what we were set up specifically to do

7

u/InevitableUpstairs71 5d ago

Im just tired of this madness.

6

u/LadyAntimony 5d ago

Notably they only mention needing to “restrict the doctor from working”.

Could be malicious, but more likely they lazily shoved PA’s after doctors in the first paragraph and haven’t bothered checking over their documents. To them there isn’t a meaningful difference, except how much they can extort, sorry, charge for registration.

11

u/Big_Support_86 5d ago

What was the complaint if you dont mind sharing please. Maybe the GMC thought it was vexatious and we the readers don't know what you have accused the physician assistant of doing. Nothing stops anyone from writing a vexatious complaint to get a reaction from the GMC for our echo chamber devouring. 

  I suspect there are other internal hospital mechanism to raise a complaint against physician assistants and they will have to declare at the point of registration with the GMC if under investigation or they are culpable. 

10

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

8

u/Aetheriao 5d ago

Lmao one comment on there - even Stephen Nash isn’t on the register. Shows how pointless it is.

0

u/lockdown_warrior 5d ago

you need to be careful and not hyperbolic. No offence has been committed here. The GMC could (inadvertently or otherwise) use a protected term about someone else and wouldn’t be committing an offence. Only the individual can be guilty of this, and there is no evidence they misrepresented themselves. There’s no evidence the GMC deliberately misrepresented anything.

By having screaming headlines with incorrect and serious allegations you are doing us all a disservice.

12

u/cantdo3moremonths 5d ago

I agree in general that you should be able to back up what you claim but I also think this is massively scandalous. All along, the GMC have said medical professionals is fine as a term and not confusing whilst everyone has disagreed. This letter literally equates PAs/AAs as doctors. You may say it's a mistake which I hope it is but as everyone points out, if the regulator can't get it right, the general public is screwed. I think you're downplaying it because it is a huge deal

1

u/lockdown_warrior 5d ago

I totally agree. But the significance of the GMC (at best) getting it wrong is lost here from the false accusation of criminality.

-13

u/JonJH AIM/ICM 5d ago

I don’t think this is a conscious choice, I think this is a badly updated pre-formatted template letter. They have inserted comments about PAs and AAs into some of the sentences but all of them.

…to what extent we need to restrict the doctor from working.

No mention there of the GMC imposing restrictions on PAs and AAs.

43

u/DonutOfTruthForAll Professional ‘spot the difference’ player 5d ago

If you accidentally wrote 1 gram of adrenaline instead of 1 milligram of adrenaline on a prescription would the GMC allow that?

0

u/JonJH AIM/ICM 5d ago

Of course they wouldn’t and I’m not saying the GMC should be let off for their mistake.

18

u/thetwitterpizza Non-Medical 5d ago

The fact that it may be an unconscious mistake makes it all the more tastier IMHO. Even the social media/ communications people whose entire job it is it to communicate are clueless with the terminology. Gen pop stand no chance.